One of the best sections is Jomier's brief courtship of an attractive, pleasant and much younger woman who has openly signalled that much older men are her thing. Read turns their dates into something both hilarious, almost farcical, yet truthful. 

In a Roth novel the young lady would be penetrated in a few paragraphs, but despite having gone to the trouble of arming himself with Viagra, Jomier just realises that it's too much trouble and too futureless to proceed. It makes you proud to be British.

Although this is also the familiar vein of the Hampstead dinner party/adultery novel (albeit in West London), where action is minimal, and contemplation and observation paramount, Read has played a blinder.

Funny, sharp, with the inevitable Catholicism discreetly and intelligently arranged, and a beautifully concealed twist at the end, this is the mordant novel of fin de millennium London that Martin Amis could have written in The Pregnant Widow, but didn't. 

Perhaps because Read has been a little out of fashion lately, not subject to the primping and constant fawning by the press that Amis enjoys, he's got hungry and been absolutely ruthless with himself and his prose and succeeded in making the novel taut and Jomier appealingly grumpy:

Jomier also dislikes the theatre. As actors prance around on a stage, it strikes him that they are having more fun than he is: why, then, is he paying them?

The delightful fruit of a master.

Matterhorn is as different as it's possible to get from The Misogynist. It's a first novel, but one that took some 30 years to write. Karl Marlantes served as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam and Matterhorn has become a big hit in the US. 

The best prose accounts of Vietnam, for my money, are the non-fiction ones, Michael Herr's Dispatches or Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army, but Matterhorn is clearly going to be at the head of the pack for some time when it comes to fiction.

There tends to be a great similarity in war stories from the Iliad onwards. You know some of the characters are going to die, that you spend as much time fighting your own side as the enemy and that war is typically horrible and futile, but occasionally fun (for some).